UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
AT   LOS  ANGELES 


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SHAKSPERE 

AN  ADDRESS 


LONDON  :  HUMPHREY  MILFORD 

OXFORD  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 


SHAKSPERE 

AN  ADDRESS 

DELIVERED  ON  APRIL  23,  1916 

IN  SAUNDERS  THEATRE  AT  THE  REQUEST  OF 

THE  PRESIDENT  AND  FELLOWS  OF 

HARVARD  COLLEGE 


BY 

GEORGE  LYMAN  KITTREDGE 


CAMBRIDGE 

HARVARD  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 
1930 


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BY  HARVARD  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

Fifth  Impression 


PRINTED  AT  THE  HARVARD  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 
CAMBRIDGE,  MASS.,  U.  S.A. 


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SHAKSPERE 

Dr.  JOHNSON  was  a  wise  man  and  a  four- 
square, though  not  an  intolerant,  moralist. 
Incidentally  he  has  proved  himself  one  of 
the  most  sensible  and  serviceable  in  that  long 
array  of  professed  Shakspereans  that  bids 
fair  to  stretch  out  to  the  crack  of  doom.  In 
all  of  these  capacities  I  think  the  more  of 
him,  the  older  I  grow;  and  such,  it  seems, 
is  the  common  experience  of  Uterary  men. 
To-day,  and  on  this  occasion,  he  sustains  me 
— nay,  he  comes  to  my  rescue — with  one  of 
the  most  pregnant  and  unforced,  yet  most 
searching,  of  his  many  admirable  truisms, 
to  the  effect  that  men  need,  in  general,  not 
so  much  to  be  informed  as  to  be  reminded. 
But  for  that  supporting  adage,  I  know 
not  how  I  should  have  mustered  courage  to 
approach  this  hour.  For  I  have  neither 
conceit  enough  to  fancy  that  I  can  say  any- 
thing new;  nor  stodginess  enough  to  re- 
hearse old  saws  with  the  self-con\dction  of 


8  SHAKSPERE 

Sir  Oracle;  nor  sophistry  enough  to  turn 
commonplaces  into  paradoxes  by  standing 
them  on  their  heads;  nor  enough  of  the 
philosopher  or  the  modern  critic  in  mc  to 
parade  them  as  novelties  by  draping  their 
shrunk  shanks  in  the  ample  robes  of  an 
esoteric  jargon. 

I  am  not  here  to  rationalize  the  miracle  of 
Shakspere,  or  to  define  poetry,  or  to  account 
for  its  emergence,  or  the  emergence  of  genius 
either,  in  the  history  of  mankind  at  large, 
or  in  any  particular  period  in  the  annals 
of  a  given  race,  a  given  nation,  or  a  given 
language. 

My  liege  and  madam,  to  expatiate 
What  majesty  should  be,  what  duty  is, 
Why  day  is  day,  night  night,  and  time  is  time  — 
Were  nothing  but  to  waste  night,  day,  and  time. 

Frankly,  I  can  solve  none  of  these  problems. 
I  am  quite  as  much  amazed  at  the  splendid 
accident  of  genius  in  the  supreme  dramatic 
poet,  as  I  am  aghast  at  the  same  splendid 
accident  in  the  skin-clad  savage  (name  and 
date  unknown)  who  first  invented  the  fish- 
hook or  the  blowgun  or  the  fire-drill,  or  dis- 


SHAKSPERE  9 

covered  that  a  dugout  is  a  handier  craft 
than  a  solid  log.  Of  Shakspere's  life  we 
know  a  good  deal,  but  nothing  that  explains 
him.  Nor  should  we  be  better  off  in  this 
regard  if  we  had  his  pedigree  to  the  twen- 
tieth generation,  with  a  record  of  everything 
that  his  forbears  did  and  said  and  thought 
and  imagined  and  dreamed.  God  is  great, 
and  from  time  to  time  his  prophets  come 
into  the  world.  "  The  wind  bloweth  where 
it  listeth — and  thou  hearest  the  sound  there- 
of, but  canst  not  tell  whence  it  cometh,  and 
whither  it  goeth.  So  is  everyone  that  is  born 
of  the  spirit." 

Still,  I  can  analyze  Shakspere  roughly, 
though  I  cannot  account  for  him.  He  had 
the  ability  to  put  himself  in  your  place,  and 
then  —  to  speak.  Sympathetic  knowledge 
9f  human  nature  we  call  it,  and  the  gift  of 
expression.  Rarely,  very  rarely,  do  they 
hunt  in  couples.  William  Shakspere  of 
Stratford  and  London,  actor,  poet,  good 
fellow,  dramatist,  theatrical  proprietor,  and 
Englishman  of  the  most  thorough  and  in- 
dubitable breed  —  like  Geoffrey  Chaucer, 


lo  SHAKSPERE 

burgher  of  London,  poet,  diplomatist,  com- 
missioner of  dykes  and  ditches,  M.P.  for 
Kent,  and  Englishman  in  blood  and  marrow 
—  could  enter  at  will  into  the  thoughts  and 
feelings  of  a  wide  range  of  human  beings  in 
a  multitude  of  experiences  and  under  cir- 
cumstances of  infinite  variety,  and  then  he 
could  make  them  speak,  not  as  they  would 
have  spoken  in  real  life,  —  for  most  of  us 
are  dumb  or  tongue-tied,  particularly  when 
we  have  anything  to  say,  —  but  as  they 
would  have  spoken  if  they  had  been  Shak- 
spere,  if  they  had  been  endowed  by  heaven 
with  his  power  to  express.  In  addition,  he 
had  the  gift  of  poetry — define  it  if  you  can. 
And,  to  close  the  account,  he  had  learned 
the  trade  or  art  or  craft  of  bringing  plays  to 
pass,  or,  in  other  words,  of  representing  life 
and  thought  in  action  in  a  mimic  world. 
That  is  all  there  is  to  Shakspere.  It  is  simple 
enough  to  tell,  but  not  so  easy  to  be! 

It  is  a  commonplace  to  say  that  the  poet 
creates;  but  it  is  one  of  those  oracular  com- 
monplaces that  need  to  be  often  repeated, 
and  continually  irbterpreted  in  the  process  of 


SHAKSPERE  1 1 

repetition.  And  such  constant  reinterpreta- 
tion  of  the  oracle  is  notably  imperative  in 
the  case  of  the  supreme  dramatist.  For 
his  creatures  are  like  those  of  God.  They 
move  and  think  and  act  by  virtue  of  the 
inherent  vitality  which  he  breathed  into 
them  when  they  became  each  a  Uving  crea- 
ture. We  see  them,  and  associate  with 
them,  as  with  our  fellow-mortals.  Only  in 
part  are  they  revealed  to  us  by  observation 
for  we  can  observe  them  only  at  disjointed 
intervals,  as  their  hnes  of  Hfe  intersect  our 
own.  They  cross  our  path  and  disappear, 
and  by-and-by  we  discern  them  in  the  dis- 
tance, or  they  surprise  us  by  appearing  once 
more  at  our  elbow,  in  the  crowd,  on  another 
day.  What  they  think  and  do  in  the  mean- 
time—  like  what  they  have  thought  and 
done  before  we  saw  them  first  —  is  not  re- 
vealed to  us.  That  we  must  learn,  if  at 
all,  by  inference  from  the  segments  of  their 
lives  that  we  have  seen,  from  the  fractions 
of  their  talk  that  we  have  heard.  We  must 
plot  the  curve  by  the  isolated  points  that 
we  are  casually  able  to  fix. 


12  SHAKSPERE 

As  with  our  fellow-creatures  in  real  life, 
so  is  it  with  our  fellow-creatures  in  Shak- 
spere.  There  neither  is  nor  can  be  any  exclu- 
sive or  orthodox  interpretation.  Each  of  us 
must  read  the  riddle  of  motive  and  person- 
ality for  himself.  There  will  be  as  many 
Hamlets  or  Macbeths  or  Othellos  as  there 
are  readers  or  spectators.  For  the  impres- 
sions are  not  made,  or  meant  to  be  made, 
on  one  uniformly  registering  and  mechani- 
cally accurate  instrument,  but  on  an  infinite 
variety  of  capriciously  sensitive  and  unac- 
countable individualities  —  on  us,  in  short, 
who  see  as  we  can,  and  understand  as  we 
are.  Your  Hamlet  is  not  my  Hamlet,  for 
your  ego  is  not  my  ego.  Yet  both  your 
Hamlet  and  mine  are  really  existent;  and 
mine  is  as  much  to  my  life  as  yours  to  yours 
—  and  both  are  justifiable,  if  your  personal- 
ity and  mine  have  any  claim  to  exist.  You 
shall  convert  me  if  you  can,  for  I  am  docile 
and  accessible  to  reason;  but,  when  all  is 
said,  and  you  have  taught  me  whatever  is 
teachable,  there  must  still  remain,  in  the 
last  analysis,  a  difference  that  is  beyond 


SHAKSPERE  1 3 

reconciliation,  except  in  the  universal  sol- 
vent of  our  common  humanity.  Otherwise 
you  and  I  and  Hamlet  are  not  individuals, . 
but  merely  t}pes  and  symbols,  or  (worst 
of  worst)  stark  formulas,  masquerading  as 
God's  creatures  in  a  world  that  is  too  full 
of  formulas  already. 

These  principles,  however,  give  no  license 
to  capricious  propaganda.  For  there  is  one 
corrective  and  restraining  proviso.  Some- 
where there  exists,  and  must  be  discov- 
erable, the  soUd  fact  —  and  that  fact  is 
Shakspere's  Hamlet  or  Macbeth  or  Othello. 
And  this  actual  being  is  not  to  be  confused, 
in  your  apprehension  or  in  mine,  with  any 
of  the  figures  that  we  have  constructed, 
each  for  himself,  by  the  instinctive  reac- 
tion of  our  several  personahties  under  the 
stimulus  of  the  poet's  art.  Each  of  us  has 
a  prescriptive  right  to  his  own  Hamlet; 
but  none  of  us  has  a  charter  to  impose  it 
either  upon  his  neighbor  or  upon  himself  as 
the  poet's  intent.  We  should  recognize  it 
rather,  and  cherish  it,  as  our  private  prop- 
erty —  as  something  that  we  have  ourselves 


14  SHAKSPERE 

achieved  when  our  minds  and  hearts  have 
been  kindled  by  a  spark  from  his  altar  or  a 
tongue  of  flame  from  his  Promethean  fire. 

If  much  of  what  I  have  said  sounds  like 
sentimentality,  I  cannot  help  it.  It  is  not 
sentimentality:  it  is  plain,  hard  matter  of 
fact.  Indeed,  I  am  not  quite  sure  but  it  is 
science  (I  speak  with  bated  breath)  —  and  I 
am  quite  certain  that  it  is  psychology.  Per- 
haps it  may  even  be  criticism,  but  I  hardly 
think  so. 

The  actor's  problem  is  quite  difTerent. 
His  duty  —  and  it  is  also  his  high  privilege 
—  is  to  energize  the  character.  He  must  let 
the  conception  possess  him,  so  that  the  two 
personalities  are  merged,  are  as  completely 
coincident  as  possible;  and  then,  when  he 
has  forgotten  himself  in  the  part,  he  must 
act.  But,  of  course,  though  he  ceases  for 
the  time  being  to  represent  his  own  ego,  he 
need  not  —  nay,  he  cannot  —  abolish  or 
annihilate  it,  any  more  than  he  can  abolish 
or  annihilate  his  hands  or  his  eyes.  He  is, 
or  should  be,  the  part  he  plays.  That  is 
obvious  and  fundamental.    But  —  no  less 


SHAKSPERE  15 

truly,  though  to  a  less  degree  —  the  part  is 
he.  The  actor,  then,  is  not  a  puppet,  of 
which  Shakspere  or  some  critic  pulls  the 
strings.  He  is  co-creator  with  the  poet, 
translating  derived  impulses  into  action  — 
but  originating  impulses  too,  so  that  the 
outcome  of  it  all  is  Shakspere's  man  or 
woman  expressed  in  terms  of  this  actor's 
art,  but  also  in  terms  of  this  actor's  nature. 
What  is  given,  set  down,  clearly  expressed, 
he  is  not  at  liberty  to  alter  or  blindly  to  mis- 
construe, but  the  connecting  links  must  be 
forged  by  his  genius.  And  thus  it  is  that 
we  may  disagree,  but  we  may  not  condemn. 
For  his  embodiment  of  the  character  is  a 
fact,  an  entity,  a  concrete  denizen  of  the 
imaginative  world,  that  wins  a  right  to  exist 
by  its  own  lifelikeness,  its  own  fidelity  to 
human  nature,  whether  or  not  it  accords 
in  all  particulars  with  what  Shakspere  in- 
ferentially  meant.  Shakspere  planted,  the 
critic  watered,  but  —  not  to  speak  it  pro- 
fanely —  God  giveth  the  increase ;  for  all 
genius  is  of  God,  nor  can  any  amount  of 
psychological  finessing  define  it  otherwise. 


1 6  SHAKSPERE 

If  the  player  cannot  thus  embody  the  part, 
his  hour  to  strut  and  fret  will  be  brief  in- 
deed. Let  him  sink  to  the  ranks  of  the 
more  wooden  t^pe  of  scholar,  or  join  the 
chorus  of  irresponsible,  indolent  reviewers. 
The  interpretative  critic  has  still  a  dif- 
ferent function.  His  primal  duty  is  mani- 
fest: it  is  to  understand.  And  when  he  has 
understood,  he  must  expound  —  expound 
what  Shakspere  meant.  This  requires  some 
self-control,  lest  the  disciple  mistake  him- 
self for  the  master.  The  temptation  is  al- 
most compulsive,  now  and  then,  to  close  the 
book  and  dream  away  at  a  tangent,  un- 
aware that  one  has  left  the  track.  This 
another  poet  may  do,  and  so  we  have  Childe 
Roland  to  the  Dark  Tower  Came  or  Caliban 
upon  Setebos:  not  Shakspere's  dark  tower 
or  Shakspere's  Caliban,  but  Browning's  — 
new  creations,  not  interpretations  at  all. 
Such,  however,  is  not  a  critic's  privilege. 
He  must  never  close  the  book  until  he  is 
sure  that  he  has  read  to  the  end.  For  it  is 
Shakspere  that  he  professes,  and  he  should 
keep  the  faith. 


SHAKSPERE  1 7 

Let  me  illustrate.  The  subject  is  Cali- 
ban, and  the  critic  is  no  less  a  personage 
than  the  great  Schlegel.  "  Caliban,"  writes 
Schlegel,  "  has  picked  up  everything  dis- 
sonant and  thorny  in  language,  to  compose 
out  of  it  a  vocabulary  of  his  own ;  and  of  the 
whole  variety  of  nature,  the  hateful,  repul- 
sive, and  pettily  deformed  have  alone  been 
impressed  on  his  imagination.  The  magical 
world  of  spirits,  which  the  staff  of  Prospero 
has  assembled  on  the  island,  casts  merely  a 
faint  reflection  into  his  mind,  as  a  ray  of 
light  which  falls  into  a  dark  cave,  incapable 
of  communicating  to  it  either  heat  or  illumi- 
nation, and  serves  merely  to  set  in  motion 
the  poisonous  vapours."  This  is  beautiful. 
It  stimulates  and  satisfies  at  the  same  time. 
But,  as  with  other  stimulants,  there  comes 
the  reaction.  "  Was  the  hope  drunk,"  cries 
Lady  Macbeth,  "  wherein  you  dressed  your- 
self ?  Hath  it  slept  since  ?  And  wakes  it 
now  to  look  so  green  and  pale  at  what  it  did 
so  freely?"  The  reaction  comes  when  we 
test  the  critic's  dictum  by  the  facts  of  Shak- 
spere.  What  of  the  words  of  CaUban  when 
he  hears  the  mysterious  music  ? 


1 8  SHAKSPERE 

Be  not  afeard;  the  isle  is  full  of  noises, 
Sounds  and  sweet  airs,  that  give  delight  and  hurt 

not. 
Sometimes  a  thousand  twangling  instruments 
Will  hum  about  mine  ears;   and  sometimes  voices, 
That  if  I  then  had  wak'd  after  long  sleep 
Will  make  me  sleep  again :   and  then,  in  dream- 
ing. 
The  clouds  methought  would  open,  and  show  riches 
Ready  to  drop  upon  me;  that,  when  I  wak'd, 
I  cried  to  dream  again. 

Is  this  a  dissonant  vocabulary,  made  up  of 
all  that  is  thorny  in  language  ?  Does  this 
show  that  "  of  the  whole  variety  of  nature, 
the  hateful,  repulsive,  and  pettily  deformed 
have  alone  been  impressed  on  Caliban's  im- 
agination"? The  truth  is,  that  Schlegel, 
like  Browning,  has  invented  his  own  Cali- 
ban: it  may  be  better  than  Shakspere's,  it 
may  be  worse,  but  Shakspere's  it  is  not. 

And,  speaking  of  Caliban,  we  may  note 
how  little  attention  has  been  paid  to  what 
Shakspere  has  emphasized,  subtly  but  un- 
mistakably—his reformation,  or,  to  be  more 
precise,  the  dawn  of  morality  in  his  soul. 
For  in  one  point  the  gross  Caliban  is  su- 
perior to  the  delicate  and  charming  Ariel- 


SHAKSPERE  1 9 

he  has  a  soul,  and  is  therefore  capable  of 
moral  development,  whereas  Ariel  is  but  an 
elemental  spirit,  without  heart,  or  consci- 
ence, or  human  motives,  whose  aversion  to 
the  earthy  and  abhorred  commands  of  Sy- 
corax  is  but  the  instinctive  recoil  of  opposites. 
Caliban's  father  may  have  been  a  devil,  but 
his  mother  was  human  —  and  he  can  be 
saved.  Thus  it  comes  that,  at  the  end  of 
the  play,  he  is  like  a  child  who  has  made  his 
first  self-adjustment  to  the  intellectual  and 
moral  forces  of  the  world.  "  Ay,  that  I 
will!  "  he  rephes,  in  hearty  obedience  to 
Prospero's  command: 

Ay,  that  I  will!  and  I'll  be  wise  hereafter, 
And  seek  for  grace.    What  a  thrice-double  ass 
Was  I,  to  take  this  drunkard  for  a  god 
And  worship  this  dull  fool! 

In  his  exposition  Shakspere  always  fol- 
lows the  established  Elizabethan  method, 
which  was,  to  make  every  significant  point 
as  clear  as  daylight,  and  to  omit  nothing 
that  the  writer  regarded  as  of  importance. 
However  much  the  dramatis  personae  mys- 
tify each  other,  the  audience  is  never  to  be 


^ 


20  SHAKSPERE 

perplexed:  it  is  invariably  in  the  secret. 
Edgar  enters  disguised  as  Poor  Tom.  We 
know  him  at  a  glance,  for  he  has  already 
announced  his  intention  thus  to  masquer- 
ade, and  has  described  in  detail  the  appear- 
ance and  manners  of  these  Bedlam  beggars 
of  whom  "  the  country  gives  him  proof  and 
precedent."  But,  that  there  may  be  no 
possibility  of  confusion  in  the  barrenest- 
witted  groundling,  the  transformed  man  no 
sooner  comes  upon  the  stage  than  he  re- 
peats the  name  by  which  he  has  declared 
that  he  will  call  himself. 

This  is  t>pical  of  Shakspere's  procedure. 
And  what  is  true  of  the  mechanics  of  dis- 
guising, holds  just  as  well  with  regard  to 
the  motives  of  the  persons,  the  main  fea- 
tures of  their  character,  and  any  sudden 
change  in  their  conduct,  so  far  as  this  might 
shock  or  confuse  the  beholders.  Macbeth 
at  Dunsinane  is  very  different  from  the 
Macbeth  that  we  have  come  to  knoiv.  True, 
we  have  seen  him  in  moments  of  strange 
agitation,  but  never  before  in  this  half-fran- 
tic state  —  raging  and  depressed  by  turns, 


SHAKSPERE  21 

railing  at  his  attendants  with  more  than  a 
touch  of  BilHngsgate,  yet  instantly  soaring 
to  heights  of  imaginative  poetry,  tormented 
by  a  physical  restlessness  that  will  not  let 
him  stand  still  long  enough  to  finish  arming. 
However,  we  are  not  unprepared  for  the 
spectacle.  In  the  scene  that  precedes,  Caith- 
ness informs  us  with  satisfying  particularity 
that  the  tyrant  has  lost  his  self-control: 

Some  say  he's  mad.  Others,  that  lesser  hate  him, 
Do  call  it  valiant  fury. 

Hamlet  is  going  to  his  mother's  closet.    It 

is  his  purpose  to  upbraid  her  in  no  measured 

terms  —  to  bear  himself  so  roughly  that  she 

shall  confess  her  guilt  if,  as  he  still  suspects, 

she  had  any  cognizance  of  her  husband's 

crime.     Indeed,  when  the  time  comes,  his 

mien  is  so  threatening  that  she  shrieks  for 

help.    But  it  is  essential  that  the  audience 

shall  not  share  her  alarm.    We  must  never 

for  a  moment  fearthat  Hamlet  is  in  danger 

of  murdering  his  mother.     Hence  the  soUl- 

oquy  that  comes  before: 

Let  not  ever 
The  soul  of  Nero  enter  this  firm  bosom; 


22  SHAKSPERE 

Let  me  be  cruel,  not  unnatural. 

I  will  speak  daggers  to  her,  but  use  none! 

This  method  of  exposition  carries  a  mo- 
mentous corollary,  too  often  missed,  though 
the  principle  is  a  commonplace,  by  those 
critics  who  wish  to  know  more  than  Shak- 
spere  has  chosen  to  tell  them :  —  Nothing 
that  is  omitted  is  of  any  significance.  We 
are  not  at  liberty,  therefore,  to  enrich  the 
plot  with  our  own  inventions,  or  to  substi- 
tute anything  whatever  for  the  plain  state- 
ment of  an  expository  passage. 

In  Macbeth,  for  instance,  two  points  in 
the  king's  history  are  exactly  designated: 
the  moment  at  which  the  thought  of  kill- 
ing Duncan  enters  his  mind  for  the  first 
time,  only  to  be  put  aside  with  horror;  and 
the  moment  when  the  thought  recurs  and 
ripens  into  a  purpose.  These  two  points 
are  fixed  and  immutable;  they  are  not  to 
be  ignored,  and  they  cannot  be  ex-plained 
away.  And  they  exclude  the  rather  preva- 
lent theory  that  Macbeth  had  planned  the 
murder,  or  dallied  with  the  thought  of  it, 
before  the  opening  scene  of  the  play.    The 


SHAKSPERE  23 

importance  of  this  consideration  in  deter- 
mining the  character  of  Macbeth  needs  no 
emphasis.  It  has  also  its  bearing  on  the 
role  of  the  Weird  Sisters.  These  are  in  no 
sense  abstractions,  or  mere  visible  symbols 
of  the  criminal  impulse.  They  are  concrete 
supernatural  beings,  as  actually  existent  as 
the  Eumenides  in  ^Eschylus,  with  whom, 
indeed,  they  challenge  comparison.  They 
are  the  Fates  who  control  Macbeth's  des- 
tiny, and  against  whom  his  will  is  powerless. 
Is  there  a  contradiction  —  a  clash  between 
necessity  and  free  will  ?  Be  it  so.  Mac- 
beth's guilt  is  not  diminished.  Shakspere 
sets  forth  life  and  character  in  action.  It  is 
not  his  office  to  reconcile  the  everlasting 
antinomies.  As  for  you  and  me,  we  may  do 
so  if  we  can;  but  we  must  not  distort  the 
drama. 

If  we  would  interpret  Shakspere,  — 
whether  as  actors,  or  as  public  critics,  or 
merely  for  our  private  enHghtenment  and 
behoof,  —  we  must  comprehend  his  media 
of  expression:  which  were,  first,  dramatic; 
and  second,  Elizabethan.    And  the  second 


24  SHAKSPERE 

medium,  the  Elizabethan,  includes  two 
elements,  the  times  and  the  language,  with 
neither  of  which  is  it  quite  easy  for  us  to 
get  into  intimate  relations.  For  in  such  an 
enterprise  we  moderns,  we  Americans,  have 
much  to  learn,  and  scarcely  less  to  unlearn. 
We  enjoy,  to  be  sure,  the  enormous  advan- 
tage of  distance,  both  in  time  and  space.  In 
some  ways  we  can  see  the  better  because 
our  eyes  are  not  close  to  the  object.  But 
distance  is  deceptive,  too;  and  there  are 
clouds  between,  and  some  shadows,  and 
much  smoke  from  heretical  altars,  and  the 
fumes  of  incense  from  many  ill-swung 
censers. 

In  his  own  day,  Shakspere  was  one  of  the 
best-known  figures  in  England.  He  was 
held  in  high  esteem,  both  as  a  man  and  as 
a  poet,  while  in  his  capacity  of  dramatic 
author  he  was  not  only  immensely  popu- 
lar, but  was  rated  at  something  like  his  true 
value  by  most  persons  of  taste  and  judg- 
ment. In  the  century  and  a  half  that  fol- 
lowed, criticism  was  busy:  some  voices  were 
raised  in  outspoken  condemnation,  many  in 


SHAKSPERE  25 

doubt  or  anxiety  or  oddly  qualified  praise. 
Still,  his  reputation  and  popularity  suffered 
no  eclipse;  and,  as  we  approach  the  nine- 
teenth century,  we  find  ourselves  moving 
forward  both  with  wind  and  stream.  The 
age  was  at  hand  that  should  deify  Shak- 
spere,  be  it  for  good  or  ill.  He  was  becom- 
ing, not  the  poet  of  a  nation  or  a  race  or 
even  a  language,— which  is  more  than  either, 
— but  of  the  world  at  large,  of  all  human- 
ity, of  our  common  and  indefeasible  nature. 

The  eighteenth  century  is  a  curious  com- 
pound of  the  urbane  and  the  pedantic.  It 
admires  Shakspere  and,  what  is  more,  it 
likes  him.  But  it  insists  on  regarding  him 
as  an  untaught  genius;  it  is  almost  child- 
ish in  its  attitude  toward  his  supposed  im- 
proprieties; and  it  cannot  rid  itself  of  the 
feeling  that  he  would  have  been  even  greater 
if  he  had  known  the  rules  of  the  game. 

These  utterances  have  a  vox  exigiia,  a 
certain  thin  and  reedy  quality.  Yet,  inade- 
quate as  they  are,  and  ludicrously  in  con- 
trast with  the  robustness  of  the  age  they 
criticise,  they  are  free,  at  all  events,  from 


26  SHAKSPERE 

the  absurdities  of  idolatry.  And  idolatry,  in 
one  form  or  other,  was  the  vice  of  the  so- 
called  Romantic  criticism  of  Shakspere  that 
followed.  I  shall  neither  quarrel  with  the 
word  Romantic  nor  shall  I  define  it.  For 
life  is  too  short  to  split  hairs  over  termin- 
ology, and  as  for  definition,  I  freely  admit 
that  I  cannot  grapple  with  it  in  the  present 
instance.  Romantic  let  it  remain,  then:  it 
will  serve  to  designate,  and  each  of  you  may 
attach  to  the  term  whatever  connotations 
are  dearest  to  his  heart. 

To  the  Romantic  writers  Shakspere  ap- 
peared as  a  liberator.  He  was  the  arch- 
rebel  who  had  triumphed,  the  Prometheus 
whom  no  tyrant  Zeus  could  bind.  There- 
fore they  worshipped  him  as  a  kind  of  deity, 
creating  him  anew  in  their  own  image.  Once 
more  he  emerged  as  the  untaught  genius, 
but  not  this  tune  as  the  singer  of  unpremed- 
itated lays:  he  was  the  divine  philosopher, 
the  inexhaustible  fountain  of  all  wisdom,  the 
serene  and  perfectly  balanced  nature.  In 
him  imagination  and  insight  were  merged 
in  one  great  fiat  of  creative  power.     He 


SHAKSPERE  27 

eluded  analysis  because  he  was  too  magnifi- 
cently simple  for  the  analytic  process. 

The  criticism  of  this  period  busied  itself 
extensively  with  the  great  tragic  characters 
or,  when  turning  aside  to  comedy,  it  treated 
the  more  intellectually  significant  among 
the  comedy  group  with  a  touch  of  serious- 
ness which  too  often  robbed  them  of  their 
lighthearted  irresponsibility.  Laughter  was 
not  the  gift  of  the  Romanticist.  This  tend- 
ency to  what  may  be  called  the  portentous 
happened  to  fit  the  Anglo-Saxon  temper, 
ever  propense  to  revel  in  seriousness  and 
plunge  into  debauches  of  the  dismal.  It 
suited  our  idiosyncrasy  also  in  another  way: 
it  opened  the  door  to  the  deadliest  kind  of 
obvious  morahzing. 

Heaven  forbid  that  I  should  ascribe  all 
these  dreadful  things  to  the  Romanticists 
themselves !  They  have  sins  enough  of  their 
own  to  answer  for;  nor  am  I  undertaking  to 
chronologize  sharply,  or  to  control  my  gen- 
eralities by  the  square  and  plumb-line  of 
footnotes.  My  point  is  this:  Under  their 
lead,  their  contemporaries  and  successors, 


28  SHAKSPERE 

down  to  very  recent  times,  and  in  many 
quarters  even  now,  became  more  and  more 
inclined  to  talk  about  Shakspere,  and  less 
inclined  to  read  him;  more  and  more  dis- 
posed to  take  his  characters  as  texts,  as 
points  from  which  to  wander  into  the  land 
of  many  inventions.  His  works  were  re- 
garded, not  as  plays  written  for  immediate 
performance,  with  an  eye  to  contemporary 
spectators  and  their  tastes  and  conventions 
and  preconceived  ideas,  but  rather  as  dark 
oracles,  pronounced  with  eternity  alone  in 
mind ;  not  as  dramas  constructed  with  more 
or  less  artistic  skill,  but  as  revelations,  or 
mere  sermons,  cast  into  dramatic  form, 
either  because  that  form  came  easiest  (as 
being  the  most  generally  cultivated  in  Shak- 
spere's  age)  or  because  it  gave  best  opportu- 
nity for  impressing  the  lesson  or  driving  home 
the  moral. 

Let  us  study  the  disease  in  a  symptom. 
Take  the  soliloquy  of  the  drunken  porter  in 
Macbeth.  Here  there  is  no  mystery  at  all, 
nor  much  chance  for  moralizing,  provided 
the  play  is  looked  upon  as  a  play.    Shak- 


SHAKSPERE  29 

spere  needed  a  short  scene  to  fill  an  interval 
between  the  exit  of  Macbeth  and  his  wife 
immediately  after  the  murder,  and  Mac- 
beth's  re-entrance  with  the  blood  washed  ofif 
his  hands,  and  the  air  of  one  called  up  from 
bed  by  an  early  knock  at  the  portal. 
Obviously  he  could  not  utilize  any  of  the 
principal  characters  for  the  purpose.  Ob- 
viously, too,  the  scene  could  not  be  allowed 
to  advance  the  action.  Obviously,  again, 
the  spectators  needed  relief.  Their  emo- 
tions had  just  been  strung  to  the  highest 
tension.  Yet  another  moment  was  soon  to 
come  of  tension  equally  terrific,  when  the 
deed  should  be  discovered,  and  the  mur- 
derers should  have  to  face  their  crime.  For 
Shakspere  —  profoundly  and  practically 
versed  in  stagecraft,  and  intimately  ac- 
quainted with  the  audience  from  the  actor's 
point  of  view  —  there  was  but  one  method 
of  filling  such  a  gap :  by  comic  relief.  And 
the  comedy  had  to  be  low,  so  that  the 
laughter  might  be  full-throated.  A  drunken 
porter,  philosophizing  on  human  society  as 
he  rubbed  the  sleep  from  his  eyes  —  cata- 


30  SHAKSPERE 

loguing  the  stock  of  traditional  sinners  when 
he  ought  to  have  been  opening  the  door  — 
and  coming  at  last  to  be  broad  awake,  as 
his  body  realized  that  the  place  was  "  too 
cold  for  hell"  and  his  mind  reasserted  itself 
sufficiently  to  ask  for  his  tip  ("  I  pray  you 
remember  the  porter  ") !  What  lay  readier 
at  hand,  particularly  since  the  whole  thing 
would  be  a  realistic  touch  ?  For  there  was  a 
porter,  of  course,  and  of  course  he  had  been 
carousing  with  his  fellows  until  the  second 
cock.  For  had  not  the  gracious  Duncan 
sent  forth  great  largess  to  the  servants  ?  A 
simple  passage,  assuredly!  safe,  one  might 
suppose,  in  its  strict  conformity  to  method, 
its  manifest  adaptation  to  the  emergencies 
of  the  curtainless  Elizabethan  stage! 

But  how  was  it  dealt  with  ?  Why,  vari- 
ously, variously — on  the  quol  homines  prin- 
ciple. Some  demanded  its  excision.  Away 
with  it!  it  is  mere  foolery,  and  not  good 
foolery  either.  Argal,  it  is  spurious  and 
out  it  should  go.  This  dictum  was,  after 
all,  but  an  idolatrous  variant  of  the  eight- 
eenth-century manner.  Instead  of  censuring 


SHAKSPERE  3 1 

Shakspere  for  mixing  drollery  with  tragedy 
(a  stricture  which,  be  it  right  or  wrong, 
was  at  least  intelligible  and  regular),  this 
idolatrous  variant,  though  condemning  the 
passage  equally  and  on  much  the  same 
grounds,  absolved  the  author  by  assuming 
an  interpolation.  Yet,  after  all,  one  phrase 
was  too  Shaksperean  to  reject:  "the  prim- 
rose way  to  the  everlasting  bonfire."  That 
could  not  be  the  coinage  of  any  clownish 
player,  or  jog-trot  fabricator  of  counter- 
feit speeches.  What  then  ?  Why,  we  must 
save  that  phrase  and  delete  the  residue. 
The  passage,  we  are  told,  was  "written  for 
the  mob  by  some  other  hand,  perhaps  with 
Shakspere's  consent;  and,  finding  it  take, 
he,  with  the  remaining  ink  of  a  pen  other- 
wise employed,  just  interpolated  the  words  " 
in  question.  "Of  the  rest,  not  one  syllable 
has  the  ever-present  being  of  Shakspere." 
Now  this  subjective  and  impressionistic 
tinkering  with  the  text  is  not,  as  one  might 
fancy,  the  toilsome  trifling  of  some  aca- 
demic pedant,  one  of  those  humble  scholiasts 
whose  lives  are  spent  in  piling  up  junk- 


32  SHAKSPERE 

heaps  for  a  Variorum  to  sort  and  sift.  By 
no  means.  It  is  the  handiwork  of  a  noble 
poet  and  a  profound,  if  somewhat  misty- 
thinker  —  of  no  less  a  man  than  Coleridge. 
Yet  what  could  be  more  futile  ?  Not  a  word 
of  the  real  pertinency  of  the  passage!  Not 
a  hint  of  the  place  it  occupies  in  the  struc- 
tural economy  of  the  drama  as  a  drama  — 
as  a  play  to  be  performed,  that  is,  on  an 
actual  stage,  by  human  beings,  who  have 
their  exits  and  their  entrances,  for  which  it 
is  the  business  of  the  pla>"vvright  to  provide 
in  a  workmanlike  manner. 

Still,  a  worse  thing  was  possible;  and  of 
course  it  was  duly  perpetrated  —  this  time 
by  a  constructive  reviser.  Schiller  trans- 
forms the  character  of  the  rough  porter  com- 
pletely. Under  his  refining  hand  he  becomes 
a  lyric  personage,  who  might  be  singing  an 
aubade  to  Romeo:  —  "The  gloomy  night 
has  departed;  the  lark  is  carolHng;  the  day 
awakes;  the  sun  is  rising  in  splendor;  he 
shines  alike  on  the  palace  and  the  cottage. 
Praise  be  to  God,  who  watches  over  this 
house!  "    O  most  gentle  pulpiter!  what  a 


SHAKSPERE  33 

tedious  homily  have  you  wearied  your  par- 
ishioners withal,  and  never  cried,  ''  Have 
patience,  good  people!  " 

I  am  anxious  not  to  be  misunderstood. 
Mere  scholarship  should  not  be  arrogant. 
The  reaction  of  a  mind  like  Coleridge's,  or 
of  a  mind  like  Schiller's,  under  the  Shak- 
sperean  goad  is  by  no  means  negligible. 
For  it  is  a  fact  in  and  for  itself,  one  of  the 
phenomena  to  be  accounted  for,  a  part  of 
the  res  gestae  of  the  case.  And  now  and 
then  there  emerges,  even  from  the  chaos 
and  welter  of  sheer  impressionism,  a  created 
and  symmetrical  judgment.  Such,  for  in- 
stance, is  the  remark  of  Bodenstedt  about 
our  low  comedian:  "He  never  dreams, 
while  imagining  himself  a  porter  of  hell- 
gate,  how  near  he  comes  to  the  truth!" 
That  is  fine;  that  is  indeed  illuminating. 
That  is  enough  to  rehabilitate  the  passage, 
to  make  us  ashamed  that  we  have  ever 
presumed  to  cast  suspicion  on  its  paternity. 

We  who  are  assembled  in  this  room  to- 
day cannot  think  our  own  thoughts  about 
Shakspere.    We  are  the  unconscious  inheri- 


34  SHAKSPERE 

tors  of  a  vast  array  of  preconceived  ideas  — 
good  and  bad,  clever  and  stupid,  judicious 
and  enthusiastic.  Wriggle  as  we  may,  we 
cannot  shuffle  ofT  our  ancestry.  We  still  in- 
sensibly regard  Shakspere  as  an  untrained 
miracle  of  genius,  even  when  we  are  em- 
phasizing the  significance  of  that  best  of  all 
training,  the  training  that  comes  of  doing 
things  in  competition  with  one's  fellows. 
We  still  revert  to  Aristotle  and  his  French 
disciples,  even  if  we  have  never  read  them. 
We  never  tire  of  reviving  the  idle  contest 
between  the  two  halves  of  our  own  tempera- 
ment, which  we  strangely  personify  as 
classicism  and  romanticism,  much  as  if,  in 
Hotspur's  phrase,  we  should  each  divide 
himself  and  go  to  buffets. 

And  perhaps  the  most  unsightly  of  our 
critical  heirlooms  is  the  disposition  —  part 
classic,  part  romantic,  and  altogether  hu- 
man —  to  take  some  leading  personage  in  a 
tragedy  as  a  walking  formula  of  rudimen- 
tary ethics:  as  if  there  were  no  plot,  no 
circumstances;  as  if,  in  short,  the  character 
were  not  a  man  among  men,  but  an  abstrac- 


SHAKSPERE  35 

tion  declaiming  in  the  wilderness,  a  chimaera 
homhinans  in  vacuo. 

To  how  many  is  Othello  merely  a  type  of 
the  jealous  man,  rather  than  an  heroic  and 
simple  nature,  putting  full  trust  in  two 
friends,  both  of  whom  betray  him^  the  one 
in  angry  malice,  the  other  by  weakness  and 
self-seeking.  Brutus,  to  such  an  apprehen- 
sion, is  the  statuesque  model  of  Roman  vir- 
tue, rather  than  what  Shakspere  made  him 
—  virtuous  indeed,  high-minded,  patriotic— 
but  mistaking  his  virtue  for  abihty,  most 
serenely  stubborn  when  he  is  wrong  in  his 
opinion,  forcing  his  associates  into  measure 
after  measure  that  thwarts  their  cause  and 
ruins  it  at  the  last. 

The  most  terrifying  instance  of  what  this 
one-man  one-idea  policy  can  accomphsh  in 
the  way  of  darkening  counsel  may  be  seen 
in  the  case  of  Hamlet.  This  is  commonly 
treated  as  a  one-part  tragedy.  We  have 
even  achieved  a  proverb  that  anything  that 
lacks  or  loses  its  chief  reason  for  existence 
is  "  like  the  play  of  Hamlet  with  Hamlet 
left  out."    That  is  an  immensely  significant 


36  SHAKSPERE 

saying.  It  demonstrates  in  a  flash  the 
blind  and  naive  perversity  of  three-quarters 
of  our  Shaksperean  criticism. 

In  the  first  place,  the  subject  of  Hamlet  is 
not  the  tragedy  of  the  Prince  of  Denmark; 
it  is  not  the  tragedy  of  any  individual:  it  is 
the  tragedy  of  a  group,  of  the  whole  royal 
family;  and  their  fate  involves  the  destruc- 
tion of  the  family  of  Polonius,  which  is  very 
close  to  the  royal  line,  so  close  that  the 
Danish  mob  sees  nothing  extraordinary  in 
the  idea  of  seating  Laertes  upon  the  throne. 

Caps,  hands,  and  tongues  applaud  it  to  the  clouds, 
"  Laertes  shall  be  king  —  Laertes  kingl  " 

The  tragic  complex  is  abnost  indescrib- 
ably entangled,  despite  the  simplicity  of  the 
main  plot;  yet  it  is  brought  out  with  per- 
fect clearness.  The  moving  cause  is  not  the 
murder:  it  is  the  guilty  passion  of  Gertrude 
and  Claudius,  to  which  the  murder  is  inci- 
dental. Claudius  did  not  kill  his  brother, 
merely,  or  even  chiefly,  to  acquire  the  king- 
dom: he  killed  him  to  possess  the  queen. 
That  was  his  leading  motive,  though  of 
course  the  other  is  not  excluded.    Nothing 


SHAKSPERE  37 

is  more  striking  in  the  story  than  the  pas- 
sionate attachment  of  the  guilty  pair.  And 
to  cHnch  the  matter,  we  have  the  words  of 
Claudius  himself  in  that  matchless  soUloquy 
when  he  tries  to  pray  and  only  succeeds  in 
reasoning  hunself ,  with  pitiless  logic  and  an 
intellectual  honesty  of  which  only  the  great- 
est minds  are  capable,  into  assurance  of  his 
own  damnation. 

But  O  what  form  of  prayer 
Can  serve  my  turn  ?  Forgive  me  my  foul  murther  ? 
That  cannot  be,  since  I  am  still  possess'd 
Of  those  effects  for  which  I  did  the  murther  — 
My  crown,  mine  own  ambition,  and  my  queen  1 

Mark  the  ascending  series  —  and  the  queen 
is  at  the  top  of  the  cUmax.  That  is  where 
Claudius  puts  her  when  he  strips  his  soul 
bare,  and  forces  it  to  appear,  naked  and 
shivering,  before  the  all-seeing  eye. 

Again,  consider  the  situation  of  the  queen. 
Conscious  of  adultery,  but  innocent  of  all 
compHcity  in  the  murder,  she  is  torn  asun- 
der by  her  love  for  her  husband  and  her 
love  for  her  son.  She  would  have  peace, 
peace,  when  there  is  no  peace.     And  so 


41'r!f)15 


38  SHAKSPERE 

would  Claudius,  for  his  wife's  sake,  until  he 
learns  that  somehow  Hamlet  has  found  out 
the  truth,  and  that  it  must  be  war  to  the 
knife.  Yet  he  must  destroy  the  son  without 
alienating  the  mother.  And  so  he  becomes 
his  own  Nemesis,  for  the  queen  drinks  to 
Hamlet  from  the  chalice  prepared  by  Clau- 
dius for  his  enemy.  Two  lines  condense  the 
tragedy  of  Claudius  and  Gertrude: 

Gertrude,  do  not  drink! 
It  is  the  poisoned  cup  —  it  is  too  late! 

In  this  web  of  crisscross  tragic  entangle- 
ments Polonius  is  meshed  —  Polonius,  be- 
nevolent diplomatist  and  devoted  father  — 
and  with  him  the  son  and  daughter  whom 
he  loves  with  the  pathetic  tenderness  of  an 
old  and  failing  man,  and  who  return  his 
affection  as  it  deserves.  The  details  need 
no  rehearsal,  but  one  point  calls  for  em- 
phasis: the  deliberate  parallelism  of  situa- 
tion which  makes  Laertes  the  foil  to 
Hamlet. 

They  have  the  same  cause  at  heart: 
vengeance  for  a  father  is  their  common 
purpose.    But  their  characters  are  sharply 


SHAKSPERE  39 

contrasted.  For  Laertes  strikes  on  head- 
long impulse,  without  balancing  and  with- 
out scruple.  If  those  critics  are  right  who 
censure  Hamlet  for  alleged  inaction,  for 
weakness  of  will,  for  being  unequal  to  his 
task,  then  Laertes  should  be  commended. 
For  he  does  precisely  what  they  seem  to 
require  of  Hamlet.  But  I  hear  no  praise 
of  Laertes,  even  from  the  sternest  of  Ham- 
let's judges.  How  can  they  praise  him,  in- 
deed ?  For  his  rash  singleness  of  purpose 
makes  him  false  to  his  own  code  of  honor 
and  degrades  him  to  the  basest  uses.  Yet 
there  is  no  alternative  in  logic.  Laertes,  I 
repeat,  is  Hamlet's  foil;  and  if  Hamlet  is 
wrong,  Laertes  must  be  right. 

Veritably,  we  are  at  a  nonplus  if  we 
regard  this  complex  and  tangle  of  tragic 
situations  as  a  one-part  play,  or  —  what  is 
much  the  same  thing  —  as  a  mystery  of 
temperament  to  which  the  sole  character  of 
the  hero  is  the  master-key. 

No.  Hamlet  is  not  the  tragedy  of  a  weak- 
willed  procrastinator,  of  the  contemplative 
nature  challenged  by  fate  to  fill  the  role  of  a 


40  SHAKSPERE 

man  of  action.  On  the  contrary,  it  is  the 
tragedy  not  of  an  individual  but  of  a  group; 
and  in  its  structure  it  is  balanced,  in  the 
most  delicate  and  unstable  equilibrium,  be- 
tween two  great  personages  —  Hamlet  and 
the  King.  It  is  a  duel  to  the  death  between 
well-matched  antagonists;  so  well-matched 
indeed,  that  neither  triumphs,  but  they 
destroy  each  other  in  the  end.  Almost 
everything  that  has  been  written  about 
this  drama  is  out  of  focus.  For  Claudius 
is  either  belittled  or  disregarded;  and  — 
Hamlet's  real  obstacle  being  thus  cleared 
from  his  path  by  a  complete  misrepresenta- 
tion of  the  facts  —  a  new  obstacle  is  called 
into  being  to  account  for  his  delay:  namely, 
a  complete  misrepresentation  of  his  mental 
and  moral  character. 

The  most  emphatic  protest  against  taking 
Shakspere's  men  and  women  as  types  or 
formulas,  as  embodiments  of  this  or  that 
ethical  concept,  is  recorded  by  the  poet 
himself,  not  in  set  terms  —  though  utter- 
ances of  that  tendency  are  by  no  means 
absent  —  but  in  a   striking  point  of  his 


SHAKSPERE  41 

practice.  How  to  put  this  matter  in  ad- 
vance of  the  examples,  I  scarcely  know. 
For  the  thing  is  so  utterly  obvious  that  any 
statement  of  it  sounds  insufferably  trite. 
Let  the  examples  come  first,  then;  and  they 
shall  be  Oswald,  Claudius,  and  lago. 

Oswald  in  Lear  has  been  described  by  a 
great  writer  as  the  one  utterly  base  char- 
acter in  all  Shakspere.  The  phrase  should 
give  us  pause;  for  I  have  a  notion  that  no- 
body in  Shakspere  is  utterly  anything; 
while,  as  for  perfect  baseness,  that  would 
make  a  man  a  monster.  In  fact,  now, 
Oswald  is  a  fine  example  of  blind  fideHty  — 
he  is  pathetically  dog-like  in  his  devotion 
to  his  wicked  mistress.  Kent,  indeed,  up- 
braids him  for  it  —  for  the  phrase  is  none 
of  mine:  —  "  Knowing  naught,  like  dogs, 
but  following!  "  And  when  Oswald  has 
been  struck  down,  he  spends  his  last  breath 
in  urging  Edgar  to  carry  on  the  letter.  It 
is  a  bad  letter,  and  ought  never  to  have  been 
written  or  delivered;  but  fidehty  of  any 
kind  is  not  selfishness,  and  only  selfishness 
can  be  utterly  base. 


42  SHAKSPERE 

King  Claudius  has  fared  hard  at  the 
hands  of  both  the  moralizing  critics  and  the 
actors.  The  former  have  either  ignored  or 
denounced;  the  latter  have  cut  out  most  of 
his  lines,  and  have  reduced  him  (on  many 
stages)  to  the  role  of  a  poor,  strutting, 
mouthing  creature  —  a  cross  between  Uriah 
Heep  and  the  villain  of  melodrama.  Yet 
Shakspere's  Claudius  is  superbly  royal.  He 
confronts  the  armed  mob  with  serene  dis- 
dain when  it  breaks  into  his  palace,  o'er- 
bears  his  officers,  and  comes  howhng  for 
vengeance  to  the  very  door  of  his  chamber. 
As  to  Laertes,  who  is  doubly  dangerous  in 
that  he  has  the  rioters  under  control  —  him 
Claudius  subdues  with  a  glance  and  a  calm 
word,  as  one  might  quiet  a  fractious  child. 
The  thing  is  magnificent.  Here  is  indeed 
a  born  ruler  of  men;  nor  are  we  surprised 
that  to  him  is  assigned,  in  this  very  scene, 
the  ultimate  expression  —  now  accepted  as 
proverbial  —  of  the  divinity  that  doth 
hedge  a  king.  Yet  this  is  the  same  Claudius 
who,  in  lawless  love  for  his  brother's  crown 
and  his  brother's  wife,  crept  into  the  garden 


SHAKSPERE  43 

with  juice  of  cursed  hebenon  in  a  vial.  It 
is  likewise  the  same  Claudius  who  felt  such 
pity  for  poor  Opheha,  divided  from  herself 
and  her  fair  reason,  "without  the  which  we 
are  pictures  or  mere  beasts  "  —  the  same 
Claudius  who  could  not  pray  because  his 
intellect  was  so  pitilessly  honest  that  self- 
deceit  was  beyond  his  power  —  the  same 
Claudius  who  faced  his  own  damnation 
knowing  he  was  the  son  of  wrath,  because 
he  could  not  give  up  his  crown  or  his  queen 
and  was  too  sublime  to  juggle  with  his  con- 
science. Here  is  no  inconsistency,  but  har- 
monious synthesis  of  discordant  elements. 
We  have  a  man  before  us  —  a  very  great 
man,  though  an  enormous  malefactor. 

As  to  lago,  the  critics  seem  to  agree  in 
three  points  only:  that  he  is  bad,  that  he 
is  clever,  and  that  his  years  are  eight  and 
twenty.  Such  unanimity  is  enough,  per- 
haps, for  our  immediate  object,  though  I 
would  fain  dwell  for  a  moment  on  his  cyni- 
cal malignity  —  long  enough,  at  all  events, 
to  deny  that  it  is  "  motiveless,"  as  one 
eminent  writer  has  averred.     Motiveless 


44  SHAKSPERE 

anything  is  un-Shaksperean,  and  motiveless 
malice  is  not  even  human:  it  is  either 
devilish  or  maniacal.  Besides,  lago's  plot 
is  progressive:  it  "  breeds  itself  out  of  cir- 
cumstance "  as  he  goes  on,  until  it  has  so 
ensnared  the  contriver  that  there  is  no 
escape:  he  must  see  the  thing  through,  or 
perish.  In  its  inception,  however,  his  plan 
of  vengeance  had  involved  no  tragedy,  and 
(what  is  more  to  our  purpose)  it  was 
prompted  by  two  of  the  keenest  motives 
that  ever  stung  to  action  the  least  resentful 
of  human  creatures  —  sexual  jealousy,  and 
the  consciousness  that  pure  favoritism  had 
advanced  a  professional  inferior  over  his 
head.  This  is  enough,  no  doubt,  by  way  of 
proof  that  lago  is  not  Mephistopheles,  but  a 
human  being  —  a  proposition  that  would 
need  no  argument,  were  it  not  for  the 
lengthening  chain  of  romantic  and  impres- 
sionistic fallacies  that  we  drag  after  us  at 
each  remove  we  make  from  the  very  text  of 
Shakspere. 

Being  human,  then,  however  depraved, 
lago  is  usable,  on  Shakspere's  theory  of 


SHAKSPERE  45 

humanity,  for  the  utterance  of  great  truths. 
Nor  are  these  mere  ornamental  patches  of 
Euripidean  sententiousness:  they  are  quite 
as  intrinsic  to  his  character  as  his  biting 
satire  or  his  cynical  frankness.  Indeed, 
they  appear  to  be  somehow  the  outgrowth 
or  product  of  his  highly  intellectuaUzed 
cynicism,  as  if  he  were  the  toad  with  the 
precious  jewel  in  its  head.  Of  all  these  the 
most  remarkable  is  his  sublime  assertion 
(to  Roderigo)  of  the  supremacy  of  will  and 
reason  in  the  cultivation  of  the  moral 
faculties.  "  Vhtue!  a  fig!  'tis  in  ourselves 
that  we  are  thus  or  thus.  Our  bodies  are 
our  gardens,  to  the  which  our  wills  are 
gardeners.  So  that  if  we  will  plant  nettles, 
or  sow  lettuce;  set  hyssop,  and  weed  up 
thyme  —  supply  it  with  one  gender  of 
herbs,  or  distract  it  with  many  —  either  to 
have  it  sterile  with  idleness,  or  manured 
with  industry  —  why,  the  power  and  corri- 
gible authority  of  this  hes  in  our  wills.  If 
the  balance  of  our  Hves  had  not  one  scale 
of  reason  to  poise  another  of  sensuality,  the 
blood  and  baseness  of  our  natures  would 


46  SHAKSPERE 

conduct  us  to  most  preposterous  conclu- 
sions." That  is  a  saying  of  which  Hamlet 
himself  might  be  proud,  and  to  which  the 
noble  Brutus  would  assent  with  enthusiasm. 
But  neither  Hamlet  nor  Brutus  could  by 
any  freak  of  possibility  have  uttered  it. 
Somehow  it  is  purely  and  simply  lago  — 
lago  cap-a-pie. 

And  so  my  examples  have  spoken  for  me 
—  they  have  called  up  in  your  minds  the 
phrases  that  I  feared  to  use  on  account  of 
their  apparent  banality:  Shakspere  is  the 
great  assertor  of  the  ineradicable  soundness 
of  human  nature. 

Of  all  methods  and  ideals  in  the  study  of 
Shakspere's  dramas,  the  most  desperately 
wrong  is  that  which  seeks,  exclusively  or 
principally,  to  read  the  riddle  of  person- 
ality —  to  discover  the  man  in  his  works. 

A  little  of  this  kind  of  thing  is  harmless, 
and  may  be  stimulating,  provided  we  know 
what  we  are  doing;  for  there  is  no  reason 
why  we  should  not  now  and  then  "let  our 
frail  thoughts  dally  with  false  surmise." 
But  to  adopt  the  idea  as  a  guiding  principle, 


SHAKSPERE  47 

as  the  end  and  aim  of  all  Shakspereanism, 
is  certainly  villanous,  and  "  shows  a  most 
pitiful  ambition  in  the  [critic]  that  uses  it." 
Pitiful  for  two  reasons:  first,  because  it  is 
wasted  effort,  except,  perhaps,  for  the  men- 
tal gymnastics  of  it;  and  secondly,  because 
it  is  presumptuous  beyond  all  limits  of  per- 
missible audacity. 

Unquestionably  the  man  is  there;  the  real 
Shakspere  is  somehow  latent  in  his  plays: 
but  how  is  one  to  extract  him  ?  For  if  he 
lurks  somewhere  in  the  heart  of  Othello,  so 
likewise  he  lurks  somewhere  in  the  brain 
of  lago:  if  Hamlet  is  Shakspere,  so  also  is 
Claudius,  and  so  are  Banquo  and  Fluellen, 
Falstaff  and  Prince  Hal,  Benedick  and  Hot- 
spur, Dogberry  and  Mark  Antony,  Polonius 
and  Touchstone  and  Lear  and  Rosalind, 
Dame  Quickly  as  well  as  Cleopatra  and 
Cassius,  Pistol  and  Osric  as  well  as  Ulysses 
and  Prospero  and  CaHban.  All  are  authen- 
tic, all  are  genuine,  all  are  sincere  —  I  use 
the  regular  jargon,  the  consecrated  cant- 
words  so  full  of  sound  and  fury.  Each, 
therefore,  contains  some  fragment  of  Shak- 


48  SHAKSPERE 

spere's  nature,  or  registers  some  reaction  of 
his  idiosyncrasy.  That  is  most  certain.  But 
how  shall  we  tackle  this  stupendous  problem 
in  biochemistry  ?  Who  is  the  necromancer 
who  shall  evoke  these  demons,  or,  having 
evoked  them,  shall  control  and  organize 
their  multifarious  manifestations  ? 

Yet  the  impossible  is  ever  alluring.  The 
attempt  has  been  made,  and  the  results  are 
before  the  world.  The  outcome  is  its  own 
refutation.  It  is  either  a  compendium  of 
humanity,  a  composite  photograph,  quite 
destitute  of  salient  features,  or  else  it  is  a 
creature  shifting  and  intangible,  a  kaleido- 
scopic monster,  "  everything  by  turns  and 
nothing  long."  Assuredly  this  is  not  Shak- 
spere.    Why,  it  is  not  even  an  individual! 

You  may  think  me  malicious  in  the  selec- 
tion of  characters.  If  so,  I  wish  to  repel  the 
insinuation;  and  I  will  repel  it  by  example, 
for  the  list  has  no  guile  in  it.  Every  per- 
sonage has  been  chosen  under  the  lash  of  an 
almost  meticulous  conscience.  My  example 
shall  be  Ancient  Pistol — surely  as  unprom- 
ising a  candidate  for  the  office  of  Shak- 


SHAKSPERE  49 

sperean  representative  as  any  of  the  rout. 
And  my  passage  shall  be  an  outrageous 
example  of  frantic  Pistolese: 

Shall  packhorses 
And  hollow  pamper'd  jades  of  Asia, 
Which  cannot  go  but  thirty  mile  a  day, 
Compare  with  Caesars  and  with  Cannibals, 
And  Trojan  Greeks  ?     Nay,  rather  damn  them 

with 
King  Cerberus  —  and  let  the  welkin  roar! 
Shall  we  fall  foul  for  toys  ? 

"  By  my  troth,  captain,"  interjects  the 
anxious  hostess,  "  these  are  very  bitter 
words!  " 

Bitter  indeed!  but  for  my  present  pur- 
pose "  they  rob  the  Hybla  bees  and  leave 
them  honeyless."  For  they  fit  my  demon- 
stration to  a  nicety.  Shakspere  loved  words : 
that  is  axiomatic,  for  he  accumulated,  some- 
how, the  most  enormous  vocabulary  ever 
used  by  mortal  man.  Further,  he  loved 
words  for  their  sound,  and  not  for  their 
sense  alone.  Otherwise  he  could  not  have 
been  a  poet,  unless  it  were  in  a  singularly 
qualified  application.  And  here  we  have  him 
—  the  real  Shakspere — luxuriating  in  pure 


50  SHAKSPERE 

prodigality  of  vocal  reverberation— borrow- 
ing Gargantua's  mouth,  —  anglicizing  Jwno- 
rificahilitudinilalihus. 

Ilacc  fahitla  docet  —  but  it  would  be 
shameless  pedantry  to  indite  the  moral. 
We  remember  that  Shakspere's  "  genius 
[i.e.  his  temperament]  was  jocular "  (so 
stands  the  record)  "  and  inclining  him  to 
festivity."  We  are  not  Hkely  to  forget  the 
Mermaid  Tavern.  Wit-combats  took  place 
there  —  and  was  there  no  humor  extant  ? 
no  wild  verbal  foolery  ?  no  declamatory 
outbursts  of  glorious  nonsense  ? 

Have  I  not  proved  my  point  ?  If  Pistol  is 
Shakspere,  and  Hamlet  is  Shakspere,  what 
becomes  of  the  hunt  for  the  poet's  person- 
ality? "///c  el  ubique?  then  we'll  shift  our 
ground."  Let  us  dismiss  the  huntsmen  and 
disperse  the  pack  in  the  phrase  of  Queen 
Gertrude,  who  was  a  good  sportswoman, 
whatever  her  faults,  and  unterrified  by  the 
howls  of  Laertes'  mob : 

How  cheerfully  on  the  false  trail  they  cryl 
0,  this  is  counter,  you  false  Danish  dogs! 


^ 


SHAKSPERE  51 

BafHed  in  their  attempts  to  discover  the 
undiscoverable,  to  isolate  that  which  per- 
vades and  vivifies  the  whole  but  eludes 
analysis  and  defies  extraction  —  puzzled 
and  thwarted  by  a  personaHty  that  is 
present  and  active  as  truly  in  lago  and 
Macbeth  and  Claudius  as  in  Hamlet  and 
Prospero  and  Ulysses,  and  that  speaks 
and  moves  in  Hotspur  and  Falstaff  alike  — 
these  inquisitive  spirits,  with  one  or  two 
robust  exceptions,  have  retired  from  their 
assaults  upon  the  dramas  of  Shakspere,  and 
fallen  furiously,  in  unabashed  discomfiture, 
upon  the  defenceless  Sonnets.  Defenceless 
indeed!  for  what  Ues  so  bare  of  protection 
and  concealment  as  a  poor  Uttle  lyric  poem 
in  which,  both  from  its  very  nature  and 
from  the  conventions  that  attend  it,  the 
author  must  appear  to  unlock  his  heart  ? 
A  sonnet  (if  it  would  not  fail  of  its  purpose, 
would  not  falsify  the  end  for  which  it  comes 
into  being)  must  seem  to  be  veracious  and 
actual;  it  must  seem  to  express  authentic 
emotion,  and  —  most  perilous  of  qualities ! 
—  it  must  speak  in  the  first  person.    In  a 


52  SHAKSPERE 

word,  a  sonnet  must  be  either  patently 
artificial  (and  then  it  is  bad)  or  good  (and 
then  it  sounds  like  autobiography).  There 
is  no  escape:  a  good  sonnet  appears  to  be 
a  confession.  These  are  terms  from  which 
not  even  the  supreme  genius  can  be  ex- 
empt. He  must  either  refrain,  or  run  the 
risk  of  a  literal  (that  is,  a  personal)  interpre- 
tation. It  follows,  then,  that  the  testimony 
of  the  sonnets  must  ever  remain  ambiguous. 
Nothing  can  prove  them  autobiographical 
except  the  discovery  of  outside  evidence 
that  they  accord  with  facts  of  the  poet's  hfe: 
and  no  such  evidence  is  forthcoming. 

Here  is  no  chance  to  appeal  to  the  twice- 
battered  catchword  "  sincerity."  Are  not 
Hamlet's  soliloquies  sincere  ?  and  lago's 
cynical  revelations  of  his  code  ?  and  Mac- 
beth's  poetic  imaginings  that  visualize  to 
the  edge  of  delirium  ?  And  what  of  Clau- 
dius when  he  tries  to  pray,  and  of  Dame 
Quickly  when  she  recites  the  oath  sworn 
upon  the  parcel-gilt  goblet  ?  Each  of  these 
speeches  is  in  equal  measure  the  outbreak 
of  the  person's  character:    all  are  sincere. 


SHAKSPERE  53 

then;  and  all,  of  course,  are  in  the  first 
person.  Yet  the  /  is  nowhere  William 
Shakspere.  What  warrant,  then,  have  we 
for  assuming  other  than  a  dramatic  sin- 
cerity in  the  sonnets,  unless  we  are  wilhng 
to  argue  in  the  most  vicious  of  circles  ? 
unless  we  are  abject  enough  to  substitute 
dehberately  the  yearnings  of  our  own  sen- 
timental curiosity  for  the  operations  of 
reason  and  conscience  ? 

Let  us  therefore  be  humble.  We  may 
fancy  what  we  choose  to  fancy,  for  that  is 
our  prerogative.  But  we  have  no  right  to 
dignify  our  idle  reveries  with  the  name  of 
biographic  fact.  Shakspere  is  not  Hamlet 
—  neither  is  he  Falstaff  or  lago  or  Edmund 
or  Lear  or  Touchstone.  So  much  we  know. 
And  the  lesson  should  be  easy  to  learn. 
Perhaps  Shakspere  is  the  man  or  the  men 
of  the  sonnets  —  perhaps  he  is  not.  Asser- 
tion either  way  is  equally  fallacious,  equally 
presuming.  Nor  would  knowledge  either 
way  profit  us  if  we  could  obtain  it.  For 
what  is  any  one  of  us  that  he  should  think 
to  read  the  riddle  of  another's  personality  ? 


54  SHAKSPERE 

Here  again  the  great  assertor  of  human 
nature  speaks  a  truth  through  the  lips  of  a 
bad  man.  "  By  heaven!  "  cries  Othello,  — 
baffled  as  we  are  baffled  —  "  by  heaven,  I'll 
know  thy  thoughts!  "  And  mark  the 
answer: 

You  cannot,  if  my  heart  were  in  your  hand; 
Nor  shall  not  wliilst  'tis  in  my  custody. 


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